Bill Would Stop U.S. Aid to Middle-Eastern Terrorist Cells

As the United States government announces it’s sending more troops to war-torn Syria in order to support rebel militias — the same tactics used in Afghanistan in the early 1980s — U.S. lawmakers are now pushing a bill that would stop the aid to rebels acting in the Middle East completely.

If a private U.S. citizen decides to send money, weapons, or any kind of support to al Qaeda or members of ISIS, the congresswoman behind the bill told the House on Thursday, he will be “thrown in jail.” In spite of the laws, the U.S. government continues to use taxpayer money to do just that, helping “allies and partners of [al Qaeda], ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support.”

If the bill becomes law, the U.S. practice of assisting extremist groups directly or indirectly would be made illegal.

The piece of legislation would also require the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to offer Congress a list of individuals, nations, or terrorist organizations implicated in this matter.

By aiding groups such as Fursan al Haqq, legislators argued, the U.S. government is aiding al Qaeda, whose members are participating in the offensive against a foreign government alongside the Syrian rebels.

Regardless of where you stand on the foreign policy subject, it’s important to note that the current U.S. policy in the Middle East is extremely similar to the policy applied in Afghanistan. In the early 1980s, the federal government boosted its aid to rebels in the region fighting the Soviet Union. As many may still not know, this aid may have played an important role in supporting and helping to train terrorists in the region who went on to help create al Qaeda.

The very notion that the U.S. government is wisely using taxpayer money to veto the rebels being now supported by America is hard to back up, especially when you take into consideration how inefficient bureaucracies are.

While it’s still early to know whether this bill will see the light of day, it’s important that these tough issues are being brought up and discussed broadly. After all, the same way domestic interventionist policies create unintended consequences, interventionist policies applied abroad will have the same effect.

Gov’t Watchdog Worried About Consumer Privacy Offers no Solution to the Federal Surveillance State

Recently, the Government Accountability Office released a report on issues regarding “surreptitious tracking apps,” hoping to identify the problems with cellphone features used for stalking so that regulators and lawmakers are able to find policy solutions that protect the American consumer and his privacy.

Unfortunately for Americans across the board, GAO failed to include government-backed and run surveillance programs as features putting our privacy at risk.

The report, which can be read in full here, claims that the issue with most apps designed as tracking features is that they may intercept a smartphone’s communications, such as text messages, phone calls, and emails. Without the consent of those being tracked, GAO reported, their safety and privacy are at risk.

During a recent interview, GAO’s Physical Infrastructure Director Mark Goldstein said that while many tracking apps that offer services to parents who are concerned about their children’s whereabouts for instance have “legitimate purposes,” but many others are “marketed for what’s called surreptitious use, or where you’re not telling someone that you’re using their phone to track them, and this happens in a number of kinds of cases, for stalking and for other kinds of nefarious purposes.”

Without explaining what he meant by nefarious purposes, Goldstein went on to claim that the biggest safety issue with tracking apps available nowadays is that, if a tracker knows where you are, they “can stalk you, they can harm you.” And while “there are a variety of laws on the books, both at the federal level and at the state level that focus on different components of whether you can sell [these apps],” “millions of people report being stalked every year,” suggesting that whether the laws are in effect or not, it doesn’t matter—criminals will continue to do what they do, whether the law exists or not.

The solution, Goldstein explained, is a combination of government-backed efforts that would allegedly protect the citizen from abuse, regardless of how ineffective current laws are. These efforts include boosting the Department of Justice’s educational programs.

In the past, the DOJ launched the Stalking Resource Center, an agency that trains law enforcement officers, policymakers, victim service professionals, and others on the dangers associated with tracking technology. In 2012, reports claiming that the center did not offer any direct support to victims was mostly dismissed by mainstream media. But the program is still funded by taxpayer money.

According to Goldstein, law enforcement must also get a boost in order to effectively “prevent these things from happening and to penalize, obviously, and prosecute people who break the law in these areas.” Goldstein also added that producing more “legislative remedies” could also help to improve law enforcement effectiveness.

“The bottom line is,” Goldstein closed the interview by saying, “the technology brings us costs as well as benefits.” The fact an individual has access to a cell phone, the government employee claims, is enough to put him in danger. “As individuals,” he continued, ”we have to be alert to that, and as a government, we have to ensure that our citizens are able to use these kinds of devices without fear of something bad happening.”

Instead of micromanaging what app an individual uses on his or her phone, what GAO could have done instead to help protect American consumers was to also carry a research into whether the federal government’s spying programs are effective.

According to a White House-appointed review group as well as the nonprofit organization New America Foundation, NSA’s phone record collection has played an insignificant role in preventing terrorist attacks. But the effects of federal surveillance policies being used as we speak are not always neutral: abuse within the agency continues to put countless of innocent people—and their privacy—in danger.

“The Department of Education should be closed and its programs terminated,”says the Cato Institute. “Federal intervention into the nation’s schools has consumed great deals of taxpayer money and created large bureaucracies to administer the funding and regulations. It has produced little, if any, improvement in academic results.”

Shutting down the Dept. of Un-Ed would also cut a whopping $50 billion badly-spent dollars annually off the federal budget. That’s about $400 per household – every year. Most people can probably find something better to do with that money.

In just two minutes and 20 seconds, this video from the Cato Institute provides some genuinely shocking figures about the U.S. Department of Un-Education, and introduces the powerful case for eliminating it altogether.